Finding an affordable home to rent in Brighton can feel like searching for a needle in a haystack. The Renters Rights Act is a welcome step toward rebalancing power between tenants and landlords.
But greater protections alone won’t stop rents rising – and they won’t conjure the affordable homes our city desperately needs.
The scale of the crisis is stark. Over 5,000 people are on the council’s housing register waiting for a social home. Brighton is the most expensive area in the UK for single people. And 3,500 residents remain in temporary accommodation.
Secure and safe housing is a human right that increasingly feels like a luxury afforded to those with inherited wealth and incomes out of reach for so many of us.
High rents and a chronic shortage of genuinely affordable homes are driving out the nurses, carers, teachers, cleaners and street sweepers, the people who keep our city going, pushing them further and further afield.
At a Brighton and Hove City Council meeting in March, councillors near-unanimously backed a motion, proposed by Labour and supported wholeheartedly by the Greens, to prioritise the Brighton General Hospital site for social housing.
That cross-party consensus speaks volumes: this is not a party-political issue. It’s a humanitarian one. Access to safe, secure and affordable housing is a human right, not a luxury, yet it is increasingly treated as one.
The vote also demonstrates the power of community campaigns to shape the council’s agenda. Years of determined campaigning by local residents sent a clear message: public land must stay in public hands.
One option could be to develop the site as part of the joint venture with Hyde housing association.
The Greens would prefer not to pursue this option because what gets built is the difference between meeting community needs and serving developer interests.
In conversations with residents and campaigners in Queen’s Park, where the need for truly affordable housing is felt acutely, I hear the same conviction: every inch of public land must be used for the public good.
It’s a view widely shared – the former Labour leader of the council Lord Steve Bassam has also called for the site to be given over to social housing.
Brighton and Hove has already lost over a third of its council homes since the 1980s and too many public assets have quietly slipped into private hands.
Meanwhile, our streets are dotted with empty homes and holiday lets. We cannot afford to lose yet more public land that we will never get back so let’s keep calling loudly, and together: this land belongs to the people.
Join us tomorrow (Sunday 17 May) at 2pm at the Community Campaign Picnic to plan our next steps for this issue that defines Brighton’s past, present and future.
Councillor Marina Lademacher is a Green member of Brighton and Hove City Council.
